meganoth

"Loaded world file from different version: 'Alpha 21 (b11)'" How did that come about? How did you create your single-player world?

Not much, I was just pointing out that your calculation method of loot changes is wrong and calculated this as an example of how it really works. Certainly "a 1 in 2 chance of getting duct tape from any container that can spawn it" as you said is nowhere to be found. Even if you meant it differently, any reader would be misled by such a statement. I may have simply misunderstood a point you where making large arguments about. And don't make any plans for next week. 😇

Can we agree that the feature list of kickstarter is the game it was originally supposed to be? Can you point to any kickstarter-features that were once in the game and not there anymore? And I don't think "sandbox" for example would count here as the game was once 100% sandbox just because all the other elements were missing. Now with everything included "sandbox" is just a much smaller part of the whole game. Where is there an overhaul of progression, perks and weapons? The crafting system is getting overhauled. No weapons are changed, progression is the same like A20. And apart from a few changes of bonuses in specific perks to accomodate the new crafting system the perk system is as it was. If changing the bonuses of some perks is an overhaul then I can promise you many many more overhauls happening even in beta. In other words, do you really think they promised not to "overhaul" single perks anymore?

Ok, do you seriously see no other important reasons for the old crafting scheme to be replaced? If yes, what does that say about the quality of your theoretical advice

Did we have an argument about crafting jars? Was I trying to craft a forge? If I were I would have had enough glue/ducttape for it, so not sure what exactly I would have proved. I think you misread loot.xml. Ask yourself: Do you really find duct tape in every second car like you claim below? When an item is in a loot group, usually only one item of that list is selected (except if there is a "count=all" or "count=1,5" or similar in the header line). The default is "count=1" meaning only 1 item of that list gets selected. Now in the case of the workbench for example, there is a lootgroup groupWorkbenchLoot. It has a count=all, but the entry groupWorkbenchLoot02 has the probability-template medlow = 1/3. And in groupWorkbenchLoot02 there is a list of 8 items, one of which is glue and one other ducttape. So your chance to find glue in a workbench is 1/8*1/3 = 1/24, one in 24. The same probability is for finding duct tape, one in 24 as well. Now if you find glue in the workbench, then it is a random amount between 1 and 6, on average 3.5 glue (not 100% sure about that). On average you find about 14 glue in 100 workbenches. Does glue in A21 need boiled water? They said that making boiled water needs a cooking pot again, but I don't remember whether they also changed the glue recipe (in A20 it needs murky). Don't think so. You didn't post a complete list of possible changes and their probabilities yet. You just argued that it would be useful. Correction. When I played that map tonight I did take a look at that pond. It is bigger, with about 25 blocks size, 15 of which have been depleted. We are also on day 60 already. And I just tried to fill 45 jars and that emptied quite a lot of blocks which makes me suspect that partially emptied blocks refill themselves over time. If not then that pond should have dried up a long time ago since we overproduce meals.

The 20 seconds are real-time seconds (since the 2 minutes are as well) and I was sort of assuming you have a minibike or motorbike. To get some feel for it, I play two maps at the moment: In one we have our base in a wooden farm house and there is a small pond directly on the farm that has not dried up yet. We must be above day 30, maybe even 40, but it is a very unhurried game. No vehicle needed at all In the other game a large pond/lake that we couldn't dry up even if we play to level 300 is about 2 blocks away. It is a bit difficult estimating how many seconds it takes to drive there without actually testing it, but it can't a lot more. (Also I haven't searched if there is maybe a closer source) Your current game, do you know which water source is closest to you? I must assume you mean ingame minutes or by foot because in 5 real-time minutes driving with the minibike I am in the next town at least. I can't say how much a water block last, but that little pond in my one game has definitely less than 10 blocks (maybe 4-5) and has filled multiple hundreds of water jars already

I would guess that isn't an ability of the player or a weapon, but all zombies probably have a reaction to getting hit and the more damage they get the higher the chance for them that that reaction is bigger. Notice a zombie that walks into a trap or a cactus will AFAIK make the same stagger and I doubt that the cactus has learned any perks 😉

I would say the time to get say 100 water would consist of 2 real time minutes of switching 10 stacks of empty jars to get them filled and on average 20 seconds to get to a water source. If you then choose a location closer to water for your base you might save many of those 20 seconds amounting to less than 10% savings overall on these uncommon runs while probably increasing the distance to the trader where you have to go to for every quest. I don't see any time savings in this scenario and while I don't like the "draw" the trader presents on base location your suggestion doesn't seem to solve it and adds lots of tedious inventory clicking to the cost.

Possibly. I would guess if an experienced player were specifically looking for it even in SP he would have a high chance to get it in loot on day 1 Ah, correct. As I was checking the list of all recipes that detail escaped my notice. Just checked loot.xml, Sewing Kits are in a loot group called groupCraftingUncommon and drop as likely as GunPowder, DuctTape(!), Oil, Springs and Electrical/Mechanical Parts. Best chance to find them is cars, but with low probability in any containers. (And yes, I also checked that outside of that loot group for example Duct Tape is not occuring in some easier loot group) In the test play I mentioned above I did find 2 duct tape it seems, could as well have been sewing kits. But yes, not something you can count on. I agree that loot being the only source is taking away a bit player agency here. We have to wait if the search for dew collectors provides some instead. But I doubt that filling a stack of jars at a pond or lake or sewer was a lot of player agency to begin with. For that water places were just too numerous and jars too easy to produce to make a noticable difference If I had a say I would make the diamonds you find while mining or the testosterone extract of bears part of recipes for items (or workstations?) that provide optional but powerful utility.

Knives have no stagger at all AFAIK. They slow. The text of Deep Cut Rank1: "You might have a dull blade but you know how to use it. Craft quality 2 poor knives and deal 10% more damage. You can inflict up to 3 Bleeding Wounds on an enemy and a power attack inflicts 2. Every attack refreshes the duration on bleeding. Enemies run 10% slower while bleeding.\nUnlocks hunting knife crafting"

Maybe what happened in my test play could work as an example. See below I don't know what that myth/exploit is. Maybe nobody tried because it was a myth or too much work, you yourself explain that it isn't easy with the small forges output and all the sand and clay to dig up? What have 1000 jars (I assume to get lots of money?) to do with how much glue some beginner may want and actually have? When I was checking out which recipes exactly are available at start I started a new game, went in and looted every container on the street and went into a tier2 or tier3 residential POI. Even though I went through the starting quests as fast as I could and ignored the trader I had only 2 glue at 2pm. And I let myself get hit too much and was down to 40 health. Later I found duct tape (2 or 3, not sure because in the meantime I had converted glue to duct tape). This just as a random sample. A relatively new player could already have died, spent a lot more time in the starting quest and in checking out the trader, and finished clearing a small lvl1 POI by nightfall if he had the sense or build himself a wooden safe house through cutting some trees but with even less looting. I also found about 12 bones and could have gotten more if I removed more of the corpses. But this was just a sample play, it easily could have been 0 or 6 glue instead. What it tells me: Even an experienced player could come into the situation that at the end of the first day he has not enough glue to build a forge and have more pockets. A beginner could have even less. No problem since all of above is optional. But as I said multiple times that doesn't mean that I or that beginner doesn't WANT to craft those pocket mods and the forge nevertheless. Ok, then by your own words (to which this is the reply of the reply): "You can play 60 hours and never need to craft a single thing except a campfire to char some meat and boil water on. ". If that is the baseline then TFP needs to provide no crafting ingredients like glue at all as the campfire is already easy to build. So will they remove glue from the starting loot tables now? The fallacy in your argument is that a pocket mod, 1 glue or 7 bones and a water are practically equivalent for the purpose of providing a player with a pocket mod. TFP could as well make the pocket mod a relatively common find or instead glue or instead bones and water to satisfy the minimum condition. Your baseline tells us nothing. And as we already established, things like a pocket mod are all optional stuff to have. So TFP can't make the game impossible by withholding the pocket mod or the resources for it in loot containers. And even the forge is nice to have in the first days but not essential. So what does your baseline tells us: The lower bound for glue in loot is 0. Doesn't concern TFPs balancing very much as far as I know. Because they don't balance vanilla for veterans and have said that if people risk going into the wasteland as a low-level then they deserve whatever the find. But even if they were concerned, do you really think that getting more dew collectors early is the same level of power push than getting a q4 marksman rifle or auto shotgun? Do you really think people will go into the wasteland for dew collectors and then be OP because of it? Possibly but we differ on the amount of knowledge that we miss. We don't know most of their design rules and we don't know the limits and needs of their software. Roland made a game out of guessing a change a few times in previous alphas. The hit-to-loss ratio of the guesses wasn't all to good, including my own guesses and as an avid forum reader I should at least have seen most of the public information. I would suggest the following: Next time Roland hints at a change to solve X you post a list of solutions and their probabilites and you also post what conclusions you draw out of that list. I'm sure a long discussion about that will follow, but in the end we can compare your predictions with what actually happened. If it fits you can then say "look, just what I predicted", if it doesn't you can say "they read my analysis and adapted their plans accordingly". Win-win 😉 My bad. I was speaking about A20 there. In A21 there is no actual cooking pot schematic to find. Just that the forge will likely need a few magazines to be found, we don't know at what time beginners or veterans will be able to craft one. Likely not on day 1, so the glue wanted on that day should be 3 less. Yes. It was you who brought up FOR, I'll be happy to drop that irrelevant argument. No. Not if you want to use some jars for other things. That is not what I call solved. Sure, lots of bones to find 😉 I think my comment that even an agility player does not need to shoot ONLY exploding bolts all night to survive was totally ignored here. Even if the vanilla game would not make it possible to get enough dew collectors for this an agility player in vanilla would simply alternate between gun shooting (plus waiting longer for a growd to assemble) and bolt shooting. TFP balances whole attributes against each other in vanilla, not perks, not single weapons. If you want a cross/bow-only game you can easily mod a few parameters or simply use creative mode to get some more dew collectors. No, as I explained earlier. What you do in your early wasteland stays in early wasteland 😉 . And more dew collectors are not anything I would judge as a power boost that needs to be curbed. Those numbers are as arbitrary as my guess that there will be 10 dew collectors by day 30. Because water IS solved for common tasks (drinking+food and glue production for armors, weapons and mods) after you found about 2-3 of them, any further collectors are totally irrelevant for balance. TFP could make it so that you find a filter in every single cupboard on day 29 and it would not change balance at all (provided they make the filter unsellable). Misunderstanding aka sloppy phrasing from me. With "sewers" I just meant those open 4 block places with water in them. It was such a mini-sewer that I had overlooked in my A19 game while being low on water. "Sewer" is just my word for a convenient place to get water from as lakes and ponds are relatively scarce. Though yesterday I noticed on our current map that 2-3 small ponds are just around the corner so it seems it largely depends on the map what you find A relatively new player (started with A19) in a different co-op game I play tried to go down the real sewers on one of the first days of our A20 game and got killed very fast 😉. I would not recommend those to new players.

I already gave an example what a lot of players want to craft on day 1, a pipe machine gun (or whatever pipe gun you find ammo for). It isn't the worst thing to immediately deck out in padded armor, needs 5 duct tape. There is up to 4 pocket mods everyone wants asap And there is the forge that needs 3 duct tape (and a perk point). In SP I always spend that perk point immediately. Call me inefficient if you like. Oh, and a splint needs 1 DuctTape. Nobody really wants to craft that one, but some are forced to do it. Does a player NEED any of this? Except maybe for the splint everything is as optional as a fully loaded M60. That is not the question. Do many or most players craft this stuff as soon as possible if they know about them? That is the question and I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. I definitely do (if I don't forget it, I'm a sloppy player, I often forget the pocket mods for example). What someone can do without crafting anything is not the question. I already said I have heard of players who play the game just with a bone knife. But our argument is not about them. As it stands we don't know this yet. We know nothing about filter availability on say day 30 or 40. There really should be a smiley at the end of this nitpicking comment. 😎 Those loot tables have the actual probabilities and even more importantly when you loot a container a hundred times the actual draws you make will resemble the probabilites. That is called "the law of large numbers" in probability theory. But you try to guess probabilities while having incomplete information. And TFP then only makes one draw. See, you can influence the likelihood by cleaning the cat box, so it is useful to know. Can you "clean" The Fun Pimp Box (i.e. influence their decision before they do) ? Go ahead and try, I won't stop you 😁 Again you are arguing what is possible, not what the typical player will do. I said it already and say it again: Yes, it is possible to not craft anything, drink no murky water and still make a buttload of money in 7D2D. And for the right definition of efficiency this might even be the most efficient playstyle of them all. But that doesn't matter if we want to find out whether the average player will drink murky water if said average player does craft and does NOT make a buttload of money. Everyone can build that cooking pot on the first day, int build or not. (One just needs 3 duct tape for the forge 😉) And even Fortitude players are different among themselves, some will not take Iron Gut and even when they do, that one point will not totally change the experience they have in the first 3 days. (irony on) Yes, because all players either don't use exploding arrows/bolts or use them exclusively. And you naturally know the exact number of dew collectors they have on day x.(irony off) As a "veteran" player I'd say I probably or surely won't be forced but I may choose so because I might want the pocket mods more than I want to avoid the sewers. Ah, no. I had thought people might still craft the poncho because of nostalgia, because once it was one of the best clothing items you could craft very early. Some might still just to fill that slot. But it seems unlikely. That is stating the obvious: Even novice players know the concept of a trader and making money. And I didn't say that a novice player will not make money in the game or trade. I said he will be not as efficient as a min-maxing veteran player, he won't even be in the same ballpark of efficiency. He will also overlook some of the possible food or water sources (For example some novice players don't notice the vending machine or that it restocks every day), maybe miss the opportunity to get his first filter, buy a gun that isn't worth all his meagre money, miss loot containers, run around in heavy armor and wonder why his food drops from 100 to 0 in less than half a day... We had players here in the forum who complained that they were starving, in A19 (!!!). But even when we ignore those extremes, I don't have the impression you know how a typical new player would play this game. Maybe find a friend or relative who doesn't know 7D2D. Just as an experiment, put him before your PC and let him play this game without helping him and observe.

I would suspect that all meaningful optimizations at this stage are too complex to be ported back to A20. (AFAIK no development at all happens in A20, anything that gets added to it is a backport from A21). One optimiziation we already know of is about POI windows and yes, that is not getting ported back to A20. And I would guess that the relatively new dynamic meshes will get optimizations but I'm not sure these will show up on your benchmarks.

Yes, a general guarantee. But from this doesn't follow that a player gets enough glue for his needs in the first days, especially as not only the capabilities but also the needs of players are vastly different depending on their playstyle and the perks they spec into. It was a rhetorical question. In hindsight everybody could rationalize that this and that was a clear hint and all was logical. And if someone invested say a day or a week in listing all possible ways an objective could be achieved in a game he would have a high chance any upcoming solution is in that list. I didn't write that the tree seeds produce resin. What whole new property is needed? Seeds to glue seems a very trivial recipe. I didn't say that there aren't some probabilities we could attach to different solutions. This is always possible. But the meaningfullness and usefullness of such numbers is very limited, especially if half the information is missing. But I don't want to discourage you from making probability lists, please go ahead. Not my place to say what others do with their time 😉 You could start by making a probability list of the actual changes TFP will do to the water in experimental. I doubt the 3 days but yes, water sources will have no value once say 2 dew collectors have been acquired in most cases. Apart from that the math is easy, if you need to buy drinks from the trader it is more expensive, and ... ... players are very different in their playstyles as you yourself said in the first paragraph of your post. Why then do you argue now with the highly efficient veteran who for example knows that turret ammo gets the best prices and converts all his scrap into that. Yes, sure, you and players playing like you have no scarcity of money in the first days. I never contested that. The typical player will not get enough leather and paper in the first 3 days to even buy a food can with it and more likely will craft armor or a poncho out of the few leather scraps or just keep them in a box as many players are pack rats. Right.

No, I had meant without needing to find a schematic. workbench is not the problem

Correct, but there is no guarantee to find enough for what you want. Good point. In A20 multiplayer games a workbench is usually availabe almost immediately. The recipe can be had with the 4 perk points for the initial quests, I expect this to take a bit longer in A21 though. I thought there were some mods you could craft initially but I may be wrong. Well, didn't we often assume up to now that on average you would find 3 jars of murky water in loot on day 1 ? Even if it were 2 or 4 instead, that doesn't change much for the calculation. I also assume that just by looking into a few kitchens you often find a cooking pot. Certainly in multiplayer a pot was never a problem. And the calculation would work for any day where you have that pot anyway. Cooking them to tea and drinking them gives you 75 water. So at the end of this day you have 0 jars of water. Cooking them to tea and drinking from any open water gives you (since the chances are for dysentery to occur on average every 8th jar) 80+25 = 105 water and afterwards you still have 2 of the 3 teas left for the next day. BUT there is also the drawback of 40 hitpoints lost through drinking murky water. It may be a bit too much for murky water drinking to be something you do apart from emergencies. May need further balancing In late game where you have the need to mass produce glue and duct tape the only limit is the players endurance for grind. Thanks. Do you mean empty jars only or filled jars as well at the underlined point? And what now, 10 or 1? That seems quite a big difference. What are those "other a21 changes regarding drinkables" ? The dew collector? Anything else? Oh right. Would you have been able to predict the dew collector (if someone had told you TFP wants to make water scarce in the beginning) ? I definitely would not. I actually get surprised a lot by the solutions TFP comes up with. If yes, I bow to your superiority 😁 But more seriously, the number of solutions may be finite, there are more than you listed. Here are some more: Remove the water jar from the super corn->glue recipe Add a recipe to make glue from pine seeds or whatever else seems a possible source Add resin and recipes for wood -> resin -> glue. But it's not even that, until you exactly know where the new scheme has a problem you can't put any reliable probabilities on what solution is gonna be taken. ???? Trivially no. Water from dew collector is very cheap in the long run, murky water from sewers is the cheapest if you can afford the hit point loss. Both need no dukes day to day, only the dew collector has a one-time cost for building/buying it. For many grey-area cases we only act when someone feels disturbed or attacked by an exchange and reports it. Different people have different limits on what they accept. Voicing disapproval is not what I would call calming the waters, so you are absolutely right to not step in 😉 Fair enough.

Short answer: pipe machine gun. Long answer: There are people who can survive in 7D2D with a bone knife. Doesn't mean that the average case can or will optimize his game that far. Given a choice of drinking murky water and craft a simple mod for my stone axe or craft a pipe machine gun or a wooden bow or just drink some clean water I probably would do one of the former. And even if someone loots 3 murky water on average means that he can be unlucky and find only 2 per day on the first three days. The question is how much he then would dislike drinking murky water. A strategy someone with cooking pot and the golden rod tea recipe might take would be to produce a stack of golden rod tea, drink from sewers and heal any dysentery with golden rod tea. Will people do that? Will I do that? I don't know, that is a question we can only answer once experimental drops and we have played one or two worlds already. The point is that there is no limitation at all. Normally you might not need to make that trip, but then you might get some meat and want to make boiled meat out of it, build a mod, make some coffee or red tea for some early mining or other stamina-heavy activities (i.e. where you don't drink it for hydration but for the buff), ... And there is practically no limit. My problem here is that I know pretty well the changes in A21. But I don't know exactly the changes you are proposing. Not only is that knowledge distributed over multiple pages but I also forget details. Did you ever say whether empty jars can still be crafted in the forge with your scheme? I don't remember. What else is changed? Which makes for a lot of guessing how your mod plays out. The changes you initially suggested (as far as I remember) definitely were not enough to make water scarce. Maybe you just forgot mentioning them because the scheme is clearly worked out in your head. Or worse you are adapting the scheme whenever someone brings up a problem. Simply said: First define your mod completely in one post (with all changes you are proposing). Then we have a basis to argue about. What does rare drop mean? Acid is called a rare drop as far as I know, a tier3 weapon schematic is a rare drop. You'll likely have found say 5 or 10 acid at the end of week 2 but probably not a single tier3 weapon schematic. And I won't even try to guess what the number of filters you find will be in A21.0 experimental, the important thing will be what the number will be in A21.5 stable. We know that TFP often "errs" on the difficult side in their first balance attempts and adapts to make it more newbie-friendly after some balancing steps. I'm talking about making filters being less rare to find than you expect. You bring up far off suggestions I never mentioned and dismiss them. ?? Possibly. All of these methods create somewhat different results. At the moment none of these were mentioned and since we don't know what loopholes their scheme will have we can't really predict which correction they'll use. Whatever you do, if you put part of your money into water you have less to spend for books, magazines, weapons, armor, mods ... There are players who carefully have analyzed the game on how to get a lot of money out of selling specific stuff to the trader. And they easily have 10 times the money a newbie has at any day or more. The average player has not minmaxed the game to this degree and won't have money to throw out of the window, at least not in the first 2 to 5 weeks. Which isn't as it should be. But generalized accusations into the room where anybody could feel addressed/blamed if he so much as posted a reply to those modders do not help as well. Next time either report it or maybe try to calm the waters. A new scheme? I'm not gonna discuss another one, but notice that the developers probably have no design rule that states: "Make no new assets if possible" or "Don't remove anything". Nobody can say that TFP is averse of changes. Maybe they didn't think of your scheme exactly or maybe their scheme solved another problem they were having. Or there is a problem with your scheme that they did not want to have. Sometimes a problem can be solved many ways and the decision between the best is nearly arbitrary. Even with Rolands detailed description we don't know what alternatives were discussed and why they were rejected. So I don't see any sense into speculating what they were thinking. We can compare schemes theoretically, but will never know if TFP had other criteria we don't know of. And we can only be sure about the results when we actually have played it.

The changes in A21 will not necessarily solve your hydration problems the moment you get a cooking pot. Because you want to use some water you loot for production of food and glue you will have a motive for drinking from sewers and the like. The difference is that the only way to scale up the water production are dew collectors and those are not mass producable. In your scheme the only limit is how much inventory management grind the player is prepared to do. Find or craft 3 jars and you have enough water for yourself for a day. Find or craft another 3 jars and you immediately doubled your production capacity per run to the water source. What I specifically dislike about your solution is that the limiting factor is how much grind the user accepts. That is similar to the problem the LBD-stone axe-crafting had in A15. You don't know that yet. You are talking about 2 dew collectors but it is totally unknown how many dew collectors a player can build say on day 20 on average. I get the impression you are arguing here again that telemetry data alone can't tell TFP how many dew collectors are needed. But why are you still arguing about this? Nobody was disagreeing with you on this. When I was talking about feedback, naturally written feedback from players here in the forum should be taken into account. But that must come from a position of knowledge, for example how many dew collectors a player normally can build in a game. The math you do with 2 collectors is unavoidable BUT probably useless. Not having played it I can only guess. But I assume dew collectors will be scarce in the beginning, so if we talk about possesing 1 dew collector on day 3 and 4 people on the server I would say we still have a lot of water to buy at premium from a trader. And my group actually buys other stuff from the trader, including books, mods and yes, even a weapon sometimes. A jar of red tea according to xml costs 48*3 = 146 dukes at the trader or vending machine. That is nearly half of what one tier1 quest gives you as monetary reward. Do 2 quests and with the reward money alone you can't even afford food and drink for the day. Let alone save money for that Urban Combat book the trader has on display. Which is why I was asking if anybody was really dismissing them out of hand without bringing arguments. Do you have some examples? In your words it sounded like a witch hunt and many people were involved (you used the plural after all). I can only remember one person got somewhat into a heated discussion with them with a back and forth about who said what and what it meant, but even that person was bringing arguments (I just checked). Something between them as long as they don't violate forum rules. I prefer better commentary to accusations of "making changes without any reason" or wild speculations on what the reasons were (not refering to you here, but a few posters have done this)

Would you call a decision to include a satirical nerd-armor a bad idea? 😎 In reality: Then (A15): "I will not check this cabin and that town house, there is nothing interesting I can find there." . I remember very well that ALL normal town houses very simply ignored as soon as you left early game. There never was anything valuable in there anymore. Now: "Okay, I won't find a much better weapon, but I still need a better leg armor. And where is that damn silencer mod?" Strangely my group blasts through forged iron and forged steel as fast as we can produce them, and surely not because we can or can not build steel tools. I suspect that you play this game just as a shooter and do only minimal building. Naturally you don't need much raw materials in this case.

A friend of mine is heavily critizising the direction of 7D2D because he feels that (random) looting is just too central to the game now. The disadvantage being that the player ultimately has no meaningful decisions anymore. He has to take what he finds. That you can find fitting magazines and parts in specific POIs is one important step to give the player some control back. I hope the same happens with the dew collector, i.e. there should be specific but maybe hard to find places where you can find filters (or just a lot of water) much more frequently. This would give anyone wanting a lot of water a strategy to follow.

You fail again 😉. The developer only explained that it can't be easily **simulated in realistic detail** (i.e. only filling up when it actually rains there). So that rain has to be approximated unless they want to shove a lot of developer resources into a relatively unimportant feature. Observe that almost nothing in the game is really simulated in realistic detail. Does growing of crops check weather conditions or rain? No, all crops grow identical whether in desert, forest or winter biome. Are zombie and wildlife movements simulated? Would you be able to see the same deer if you came back to a specific area or project where a horde of wandering zombies would be after a day if you looked at their movement? No. Not simulated, still wildlife and wandering zombies are very much possible.

So lets be clear, the ones with the obvious bias have brought no arguments and just dismissed the modders? Should the modders opinion get no scrutiny? Is their opinion better than the one of other players? Do we have to adress them as "Your Majesty" ?😉 Should anyone here really accept Guppycur's silly argument that this was done because of console just because he is an excellent modder? He made that argument just to provoke a reaction, by the way. Interestingly the modders are in the same place as the developers when it comes to their own mod. Have you tried to argue with one of them that his newest change isn't a good idea and proposed your own solution? I don't think he would throw away his work immediately and use a different method without any discussion about merits of the solutions. He might actually recommend to first play the mod with the new changes and then provide feedback? Yes. It would have been much better in my opinion if some dev or Roland had immediately posted a summary of how such a change was decided and especially what the reasons were for it. (And for bonus points even some other solutions discussed and why they were not taken) Imagine Roland had posted that at the time the change was revealed:

Oh yes. Undoubtedly they also make mistakes and there even have been developers who objectively destroyed a game completely with wrong decisions. But normally a developer will at least do 2 things: Discuss changes in a group, more eyes spot more problems. And let it get tested, either by internal testers or in EA additionally by thousands of players. What we do now is no testing. What we do is theorizing (the same that is done in the internal group meeting). It has some value, but the real testing can only start once A21 has gone experimental. And at this time the developer is not looking for alternative ways to solve what he wants to be solved, as he has already implemented one solution he thinks can handle it and wants this tried out before dropping it.

Ok, but then I really don't see how your proposed system can have a similar result of water being scarce at the beginning of the game than the A21 changes. As Roland said a long time ago, find a few jars and thirst in the first few days is already a non-problem. You may have to walk to a water source a bit more often than you want but with say 3 drinks per day and say 6 jars one walk to the water source keeps you hydrated for 2 days. But this game has a lot of mechanisms without guarantees, that is part of almost any survival game. If you want to be safe that anything you plan will work then you have to play a deterministic game. The task of a game developer is not to solve your problems but to put you in front of interesting problems, like "Where can I find another filter, I need one more" or "I don't have enough expl. bolts for horde night, what weapon do I use for the rest of the night or do I invest in more traps?" So it isn't guaranteed that you can produce 75 expl. crossbows a week? Well, adapt. From past experiences I would guess that the game will be balanced so that new players will get hardly enough of those collectors and experienced players will complain about finding too many in the game too early, making it trivial. Sure, it is possible that they botch the balance, even with a handful of testers already providing feedback, but that is where the EA players come into play and give additional feedback. Sure, but the first few days WILL be an emergency situation (if Roland account of his play is to be believed). In the later game you might have a water purifier mod and maybe found too few filters so you want to keep most of the dew water for glue and exploding crossbows. In the paragraph above you fear you get too few dew collectors for your setup, here you promise me water value will be nil after the first week. That can't be both true. Is that fear of the unexpected? 😉

And I talked about limiting stack sizes having at least one serious drawback that should be taken into account. Obvious and simple solutions often don't cut it when you inspect them further. I can already see possible problems with those further solutions you are proposing. Doesn't mean they might not be solutions in the end, maybe after some adjustments. But it happens that the creator of an idea is often too "close" to it to see the drawbacks.